Internet access

[iliasChymas]

Can the watch "talk" to internet through the InfiniLink ?

I want to build an "app" on the watch to periodically hit an api and display a response.

[liamcharger]

Hi @iliasChymas

This has crossed my mind. The challenge is the size of the request response. What is the api you had in mind?

[mfalkvidd]

Another challenge is to mange HTTPS (which is required for most use-cases that utilize internet access). A certificate root store would require a lot of flash. A TLS implementation would probably increase the size of the firmware a lot, and would require quite a bit of RAM to run.

With that said, something like SLIP or BLE L2CAP CoC should be possible. A phone app or another ble-capable device such as esp32 could act as a gateway. libslirp might be something to look into as well.

But imho, application-specific proxies (like we're already using for weather and notifications) is probably a better way to go than generic internet access. Most internet protocols are pretty heavy for a constrained device like PineTime.

[liamcharger]

@mfalkvidd yeah, getting a full protocol wouldn't be feasible. Instead, we would set up a trigger in the companion app that allows it to make the request where we aren't limited, and then send a response back to the watch

Not entirely sure about how big of a request we could return to the watch anyways, I don't know what the limits are with BLE

[iliasChymas]

Hello,

I wanted to query the Google Places API to get the “Popular times” data for my gym, so I could periodically check from the watch how busy it is. Unfortunately, it seems Google doesn’t expose that data through the Places API, so I’m out of luck with that approach.

Thanks for the help!